February is for stuff I love!

[lunabee34]

1. See corvidology's Stuff I Love Post and Banner.

2. To that end, have a couple of recs:

Heaven, Earth, and the Song That Knits Them Up by gloss
Moths--Ouida
Corrèze/Vere
I continue to be utterly delighted that somebody besides me read and now loves this book. This is a very sweet post-canon interlude.

Necromancin' Dancin' [VID]
Locked Tomb vid made with fanart. This is really kickass.

3. Talking Meme

lyr asks: When you look at your writing throughout your life, what do you think has changed about it over time?

The primary change is genre. As a teen, I mostly wrote poetry. I wrote some short stories as a kid and a pre-teen, but by the time I hit my teenage years, I was exclusively writing poetry. Ditto for undergrad. Then I got to grad school. Not only was the reading load overwhelming, I got pregnant with Emma that first year. I quit writing creatively entirely--no poetry, no stories, no nothing except academic writing. Then I found fandom in late 2004, and by 2005 I was writing fanfic. Fanfic and academic writing have been the only writing I've done for most of that 16 year period (with a couple of short stories and the beginning of a novel thrown in there). In 2019, I started actively trying to write poetry again with some success, but I haven't gotten inspired or hit by the muse. It's definitely still a sit down and make myself write some poetry kinda thing at this point. But I have been regularly reading poetry, and I'm hoping that I will eventually get back into the poetry groove.

I also want to say here how much I love academic writing. Which is a good thing since that's my job. LOL But I'm good at it, and I enjoy it, and I'm so grateful for that.

Comments

[corvidology]

It's always good to love what you do! ♥

[lunabee34]

It really is. I think a lot about how grateful I am that I like my work, that I like academia, and that I am doing something I think is meaningful. It makes all the shitty parts of work bearable.

[corvidology]

Ditto! :D

[lyr]

That's interesting. I also used to write a lot more poetry when I was younger. The almost complete shift to fiction started sometime in my mid-20s, and I'm still not sure why it happened.

[lunabee34]

Have you tried to write any poetry lately? If so, does it feel different than when you were younger? Or have you completely abandoned the genre?

[lyr]

I still do it very rarely. I did a quick poem this year as part of a historical myth for a fictional world, actually. It feels very different than it used to. The process is more of a conscious, deliberate effort and less of a rushing flow of feeling. It's definitely more cerebral than visceral now. And yet, I don't think that the finished product is necessarily less emotionally intense, just more focused and restrained. It's less like I'm venting my own emotion into the slipshod containers of words, and more like I'm meticulously packing the reduced and combined chutney of many people's emotions into delicate jars that might shatter with the weight.

[lunabee34]

The process is more of a conscious, deliberate effort and less of a rushing flow of feeling. It's definitely more cerebral than visceral now.

Yes, yes! That's it exactly. I used to just be hit by jolts of inspiration. I knew exactly why the ancient Greeks believed the muse was a literal entity because it would feel like the words were coming from elsewhere and just using me as a medium to appear. Now, it's all, "What shall I write about?" and then excruciating word choice until it looks kind of like a poem. The closest I've gotten lately is when I was reading Ginsberg and wrote a poem about how much he annoys me. I think there's some good stuff there that I intend to revise/expand and turn into a real poem.